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#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: conscious
This word has appeared in 792 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
get together
to meet and spend time together
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Word of the Day
mesa
Definition: (noun) A broad, flat-topped elevation with one or more clifflike sides, common in the southwest United States.
Synonyms: table.
Usage: They scaled forest-clad heights until they emerged on a naked mesa.
Discuss
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Language Log
Teeth as part of the vocal tract
The oral cavity is one section of the vocal tract. Along with the tongue, lips, and hard and soft palates, the teeth help to form different types of speech sounds. If any one of these components is missing or deformed, it will have a pronounced (!) effect on speech production.
Two days ago, I met an older man, probably about sixty, whose teeth were highly irregular, and he was missing about half of his teeth, with gaps here and there.
It was clear to me that the man was in no way deficient in intelligence, and that he was actually knowledgeable and articulate. Problem was, he had difficulty making all the sounds he needed to express himself. It was also evident that he was trying to compensate for the missing vocal components of his mouth.
As a thoughtful, sensitive, creative listener, after a while, I got used to what aspects of his pronunciation were missing or altered, and it gradually became easier for me to understand what he was saying.
In the Chuang Tzu / Zhuangzi (Wandering on the Way), there's a character whose name I translated as "Gnaw Gap". I wonder if he was missing some teeth.
Selected readings
* "Ambling, shambling, rambling, wandering, wondering: the spirit of Master Zhuang / Chuang" (7/21/21)
* "Mosey" (7/19/21)
* "Goblet word" (5/30/20)
* Mair, Victor H., tr. Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998; first ed. New York: Bantam, 1994); also available as Zhuangzi Bilingual Edition, translated by Victor H. Mair (English) and Minci Li (Modern Chinese) (Columbus: The Ohio State University Foreign Language Publications, production of the National East Asian Languages Resource Center, OSU, 2019) — this is actually a trilingual edition, since the 736 pages volume also includes the original Classical Chinese version.
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Language Log
International Talk Like a Pirate Day, again…
We missed it this year, but the New York Times didn't , and posted a link to Laurel MacKenzie's "Pirate Lingo 101":
Past Talk Like a Pirate Day posts:
"R!", 11/03/2003
"Type like a pirate day", 9/9/2004
"R!?", 9/19/2005
"Type like a pirate", 9/18/2006
"Pirate R as I-R-eland", 9/20/2006
"Powarrr law", 9/20/2006
"Post like a pirate", 9/19/2007
"R", 9/9/2008
"Said the Pirate King, Aaarrrf", 9/27/2010
"R R R", 9/19/2012
"Talk like a pirate", 9/19/2017
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Word of the Day
embodiment
Definition: (noun) A new personification of a familiar idea.
Synonyms: avatar, incarnation.
Usage: The State is the visible embodiment of justice under the conditions of human society.
Discuss
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
kneel down
If you kneel down, you lower your height by putting one or both knees on the floor.
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Language Log
Genealogy rocks
Not only is it hard to spell, few people know what it means.
As I mentioned in earlier posts, on my trip to SLC three or four days ago, I fulfilled three of my childhood dreams: 1. float in the Great Salt Lake; 2. hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in person; 3. visit the Family Research Center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the largest genealogical library in the world (I remember that when I was a graduate student more than half a century ago, Mormon archivists spent two years filming every Chinese genealogical record in the Harvard-Yenching Library; at that time I did not understand why they would do that, now I do).
I was chatting with some people in the lobby of the motel where I was staying, and a young man in his early twenties asked me why I wanted to do #3, visit the genealogy research center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (he himself was a Mormon).
I asked him, "Do you know what "genealogy" means?"
"Rocks?" he suggested.
I burst out laughing, and felt embarrassed that I did so, because I mystified the poor young man.
Selected readings
"Being descended from Confucius" (2/9/12)
"Confucius didn't mean that" (10/23/21)
"Moody's vs. Confucius and Mencius" (12/9/23)
"Mao and Chinese Character Reform: Revisionist History on CCTV" (11/7/23)
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Language Log
Can Google AI count?
Apparently not. Given this recent tweet, in which Google AI Overview explains that "October 21 is not a Libra, as the Libra zodiac sign is from September 23 to October 22", I thought I'd try for myself. The result had a different format but the same problem:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Backflip4.png
We've previously described AI problems with counting R's in "strawberry", numbering sentences, etc., so this isn't surprising.
These various LLMs are very much a moving target, so what fails now might work next week. Or maybe not — consider the "John Backflip" legend, which was first noted in the spring of 2023 but remains alive today, as per this recent Bluesky post:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Backflip1.png
When I tried it myself this morning, Google's AI overview distances itself a tiny bit by citing the source as a YouTube video and waving its metaphorical hand at other answers, while still featuring the fable as if it were true:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Backflip0.png
The fact that most of these systems' answers are correct makes such logical and factual backflips more troubling.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
pain | pain in the arse | pain in the backside
someone or something that's annoying or troublesome
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Idiom of the Day
like attracts like
People tend to seek out or be attracted to those that are similar or like-minded. Watch the video
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Language Log
Mormon Tabernacle Choir vowel variations
I departed a total of about 260 miles from my Route 30 / Lincoln Highway running route to come down to Salt Lake City for a few perduring reasons.
1. From the time I was a little boy, I have always wanted to float in the Great Salt Lake.
2. From the time I was in junior high school, I've always wanted to hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in person.
3. From the time I was in high school, I have always wanted to visit the world's greatest collection of genealogical records, created at great expense and effort by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
Last night I was privileged to hear the MTC — all 360 members, plus 110 members of the orchestra — during their Thursday evening practice session. Of course, the director paid a lot of attention to emphasis, volume, tonal quality, pronunciation, breathing, and so forth, but what amazed me most of all was the amount of time, attention, and care he devoted to variations in the quality of vowels.
At first I was going to refer to this phenomenon as vowel gradation, but then I realized that expression has been coopted for ablaut and umlaut. So I'm referring to it as vowel variation. What was particularly stunning was the fact that the quality of the vowels he demonstrated was intimately related to the melodic contours being performed. The director paid exceedingly close attention to this linkage, and the 360 members of the choir responded immediately and exactingly.
I don't think that any notation system (IPA or other) could record on a two dimensional surface the fine gradations / variations of the director's demonstrations. It had to be done orally and even visually by perception of the director's vocal apparatus (mouth, throat, lips, and — to an extent — tongue): high, low, front, back, middle, rounded, closed, and so forth, including glissandos from one to the other. It is this dedication to the precise analysis of tone production that accounts for the smooth, full, rich sound of the MTC. Although there were 360 voices, the result was that of an intimate ensemble.
The acoustics of the tabernacle (built 1863-1867) are perfect, so I could hear every detail, though I was sitting at the back of the hall in the balcony. One of the demonstrations of the superb acoustics of the MT is that someone can tear a piece of paper at the front of the hall and you can hear it clearly from any spot in the auditorium.
Selected readings
* "Vowel chart body art" (12/26/09)
* "Tabernacle Choir" (Wikipedia)
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Language Log
Is there evidence of senility in Trump's speech?
Sarah Posner on Bluesky, linking to a kamalahq tweet and a kamalahq Instagram post:
In the thread below: a completely rambling, unhinged, incomprehensible quote from Trump at his Flint town hall with Sarah Huckabee Sanders that the Harris campaign distributed, then news headlines about same event.
Where is all the coverage that Trump is old and can't speak a coherent sentence?
I've been defending Donald Trump against similar accusations since my exchange with Geoff Pullum in 2015 — "Trump's aphasia" vs. "Trump's eloquence". Has anything changed?
The answer, I think, is "maybe, but not very much". We'll begin with the 9/17/2024 Flint passage, and then compare the 7/21/2015 passage.
The first point is that the cited passage from the recent Flint town hall is not "incomprehensible". Here's the prompt from Sarah Huckabee Sanders:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
And Mr. President, we don't mind that you give long answers, because you actually have something to say, because you actually got something done when you were president.
And Trump's response (I've edited the kamalahq transcript for accuracy, also including a bit more around the edges, with changes in blue vs. red for the original…):
Your browser does not support the audio element.
You know, it's a very interesting- cause she-
she said- I ((could)) said-
I don't think I've ever said this before.
So we do these rallies. They're massive rallies.
Everybody loves– everybody stays till the end by the way.
You know,
when she said that,
"well, your rallies people leave"
Honestly, nobody does.
And if I saw them leaving, I'd say "and ladies and gentlemen make America great again" and I'd get the hell out, ok?
Because I don't want people leaving.
But I– I do have to ((say)) so–
I give these long sometimes very complex sentences and paragraphs
But they all come together. I do it a lot. I do it with
uh… raising cane, that story; I do it with the uh
story on the catapults on the aircraft carriers, I do it with a lot of different stories.
When I mentioned Doctor Hannibal Lecter
I'm using that as an example of people that are coming in, from Silence of the Lambs.
I use it, they say
it's terrible.
So they say–
so I'll give this long complex area,
for instance that-
I talked about a lot of different territory–
the bottom line is I said the most important thing.
We're going to bring more plants into your state, and this country
to make automobiles. We're going to be bigger than before.
But the fake news
says-
There's a lot of them back there, if-
You know, for a town hall, there's a lot of peo–
but the fake news likes to say,
the fake((s)) news likes to say "oh,
he was rambling." No, no, that's not rambling.
That's genius. When you can connect the dots.
((You gotta connect-))
Now,
now,
Sarah,
if you couldn't connect the dots, you got a problem.
But every dot was connected and many stories were told in that little paragraph.
But there is something-
but they say that-
…and onward, through more complaining about not getting credit for his alleged rally sizes and crowd enthusiasm.
Incomprehensible? I don't think so — Trump is clearly complaining about various things that Harris poked fun at during the 9/10/2024 debate.
There are plenty of false starts, parentheticals, and associative jumps. But the focus on reacting to Harris's jibes is consistent and plain.
Compare the 2015 passage that Geoff Pullum reacted to. Here's the audio, followed by the (not very accurate) transcript that Geoff took from Slate magazine:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton Sch[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: watershed
This word has appeared in 168 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
seal off
to stop people from going into an area or a building, often because it isn't safe
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
busted
to be charged with a criminal offence
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Idiom of the Day
be like oil and water
To be incompatible or unable to interact or coexist easily, as due to fundamental differences in personality, opinions, beliefs, etc. Watch the video
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Language Log
"A fancy way to say 'fancy'"
I was in a Salt Lake City shop called Caputo's that bills itself as a Market and Deli, Purveyors of Regional Italian and Southern European Foods. It reminds me somewhat of the great Di Bruno Bros. in Philly, but more on the "paisan"* side (sort of like the South Asian word "desi" as used in America to describe a small down-home food shop that caters to folks from the subcontinent).
[*I absolutely love that Italian word! So much depends on the intonation with which you say it. A scholarly disquisition on a more formal set of Italian words for the same idea is the following:
You are probably thinking of the variations of the Italian “compare” often used in various dialects in the south, particularly cumpà/compà or ‘mpare/‘mbare. From Latin “compater”, formed by “cum” (with) and “pater” (father), which originally referred to the person present with the father at a child’s baptism, the child’s godfather. Over centuries these forms became a common greeting among friends in southern dialects. Since many immigrants from Italy to the US in the early 20th century were from the south and spoke their dialects, cumpà/compà /‘mpare/‘mbare became known as Italian-American colloquialisms.
In Italian, naturally I would say fra as in fratello (brother). It is very common to shorten the word by cutting off the end and emphasizing the vowel that remains at the end. To say "hey bro" in Italian, I would use one of these: “Ehi fra…” “Oi fra…” “Ciao fra…” “Ei fra…”
Another slang term for “bro” or “dude” is “zio” (uncle, like Spanish “tío,” and has the same slang meaning in Spanish too)
It comes from one of my two favorite New Jersey undergraduate paisans who took my classes a few years ago.]
I was chatting with two of the young staff members at Caputo's and asked them what they thought of a nearby Italian trattoria. They said, "A bit too bijou". There may have been a final syllable, something like "-y; -ni", but I didn't quite catch it, at least not the consonant segment, if there was one.
So I asked them to spell the word, and neither of them could do so. Then I asked them what the word meant, and the girl said "It's a fancy way to say 'fancy'", and the guy agreed with her, "Yeah, it means 'fancy'."
I thought that was an interesting way to define a word that their auditor (me) did not have the foggiest idea of what it meant.
After I left Caputo's, I gave a lot of thought to what that word "bijou'i" was and its derivation. To tell the truth, from the moment I heard the girl say "It's a fancy way to say 'fancy'", I could not help but think of "bijoux" ("jewelry", something precious; cf. "bling"). Also, the way these two young Americans said the word and talked about it, for some reason, I couldn't escape thinking that it was Congolese, of whom there are many in the SLC area. I may be completely wrong about this, and it is merely a surmise, but "bijou'i" just seemed like a Franco-Dutch Congolese creole word with an American adjectival ending. (Hah!)
Selected readings
* "Lexical bling: Vocabulary display and social status" (11/20/14)
* "Tyrant's bling" (11/12/13)
* "Bring the bling" (1/27/06)
* "Annals of word rage" (5/2/09) — Beowulf "had a bling-bling shield".
[Thanks to Nick Tursi and Vito Acosta]
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Learn English Through Football Podcast: 2024-25 Champions League Returns – Matchday 1
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Language Log
Trump all-caps theories
From Lane Greene on Bluesky (link):
I've been trying for a while to figure out a theory of Trump's capitalisation. It's mostly nouns like Country, but not always positive ones. I never did nail down the pattern.
But I've got a new theory – bear with me here.
ALL CAPS IS FOR UNGRATEFUL WOMEN.
[image or embed]
— Lane Greene (@lanegreene.bsky.social) September 21, 2024 at 12:10 PM
But then there's more data:
In investigating my theory briefly, I have found out that it has some holes. This apparently needed emergency caps too.
[image or embed]
— Lane Greene (@lanegreene.bsky.social) September 21, 2024 at 12:16 PM
Looking over a few days of "truths", I feel that Lane's idea has some force, e.g. this recent post, implicitly responding to the widely-noted gender gap in responses to Trump:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/TrumpOnWomen09202024.png
But a broader look suggests, unsurprisingly, that a broader theory is needed:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/TrumpEasterAllCaps.png
Writing in all capital letters is (often) a typographical metaphor for increased vocal effort. Sometimes increased vocal effort just means that the intended listener is further away, or that the background noise level is greater. But those issues don't really apply to text, at least not in social media, where someone raising their textual voice, across a long stretch of capital letters, suggests a higher level of emotional arousal. And as this paper explains,
Dimensional models suggest that emotion is best understood as occurring within a dimensional space, most commonly a two-dimensional space spanning valence and arousal. Emotional valence describes the extent to which an emotion is positive or negative, whereas arousal refers to its intensity, i.e., the strength of the associated emotional state (Feldman Barrett & Russell, 1999; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1997; Russell, 2003). These models typically assume valence and arousal to be at least in part distinct dimensions (Feldman Barrett & Russell, 1999; Reisenzein, 1994). However, behavioural ratings of emotion word stimuli show that highly positive and highly negative stimuli tend to be more arousing (Bradley & Lang, 1999) and negative stimuli are generally rated higher in arousal than positive stimuli (e.g., Citron, Weekes, & Ferstl, 2012).
For a little bit more on the (very large) topic of typographical metaphors, see 'Everything, everything", 5/2/2017
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
hood (1)
a neighbourhood, especially in a poor, urban area
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Idiom of the Day
like cheese at four pence
In an idle, awkward, and/or out-of-place state; being ignored, abandoned, or left to wait awkwardly. Primarily heard in UK. Watch the video
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Language Log
Vanceism of the week: "Haitia"
Back in the early 2000s, George W. Bush got a lot of flac for calling Greeks "Grecians" and making similar mistakes in the mapping from place names to ethnonyms.
J.D. Vance recently went the other way, mapping the ethnonym Haitians to a possible place name pronounced /ˈhej.ʃə/, as if it were spelled "Haitia":
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Or maybe that shoud be "Heyshuh", as in lanetteking_81/video/7415969639982828830">this TikTok video.
This slip is pretty far down on the list of things for which Vance has recently been criticized, so one of the few other recent allusions to his morphological choice is buried in this thedailyshow/video/7415781354694217006">Daily Show segment.
For those from other countries (or planets) who haven't been following this story, the Haitians in Springfield OH are legal immigrants, and the accusations of pet-eating are false.
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Word of the Day
dusky
Definition: (adjective) Characterized by little or inadequate light; shadowy.
Synonyms: twilight, twilit.
Usage: I met him on the road one dusky evening, and he insisted on seeing me safely home.
Discuss
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
line up
If you line up, you join a line of people standing one behind the other, or side by side.
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ool of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you're a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we're a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it's not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven't figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it's gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.
My response:
Geoff Pullum uses terms like "aphasia", and phrases like "I don't think there's any structure in there", in describing a quoted passage from Donald Trump's 7/21/2015 speech in Sun City SC. But in my opinion, he's been misled by a notorious problem: the apparent incoherence of much transcribed extemporized speech, even when the same material is completely comprehensible and even eloquent in audio or audio-visual form.
This apparent incoherence has two main causes: false starts and parentheticals. Both are effectively signaled in speaking — by prosody along with gesture, posture, and gaze — and therefore largely factored out by listeners. But in textual form, the cues are gone, and we lose the thread.
Has anything changed?
Certainly not the false starts and parentheticals, and also not the repetitions and the associative jumps in topic. And there's even consistency in the focus on how others don't give him the credit that he deserves. I have the impression that a detailed analysis of his various rhetorical irregularities might show a quantitative increase in some dimensions — but I haven't done that yet, and neither has anyone else.
Donald Trump's rhetorical style is certainly different from most other contemporary American politicians. And there are plenty of plausible comparisons to alcoholic speech (though Trump is a teetotaler) and to the effects of various neuropsychological disorders, including some of those associated with aging. But his style is clearly effective in reaching an audience, and there's no clear evidence of any recent changes.
For (a list of far too many) more posts on related topics, see "Past posts on Donald Trump's rhetoric".
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Word of the Day
suppliant
Definition: (noun) One praying humbly for something.
Synonyms: petitioner, requester, supplicant.
Usage: "Oh, God!" prayed the kneeling suppliant, "protect my husband, guard my son, and take my wretched life instead!"
Discuss
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
whacked | whacked out
to be very tired, or very intoxicated from the use of alcohol or drugs
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Idiom of the Day
like rats abandoning a sinking ship
With great haste and having only personal well-being in mind. (Typically said of people who begin abandoning something or someone that is failing or about to fail.) Watch the video
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